


Yearning of Youth

by ilija



Category: Bleach
Genre: Adultery, Angst, F/M, Post-Canon, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-20
Updated: 2016-09-20
Packaged: 2018-08-16 09:06:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8096212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilija/pseuds/ilija
Summary: He has to hate her or else he couldn’t go on because he can’t love her. Not in this universe.





	

Ten years he’s spent convincing himself that he hates her. He’s married to Orihime, the love of his life (why else would he have married her?); he has a child that looks like her, he’s the father. It’s the orange hair that’s a dead giveaway. So he hates Rukia. He hates the way her hair is as black as the edge of dusk and how he could find her eyes in the dark. Ichigo tries to welcome the rain that washes every reminiscence of light away because it reminds him of Rukia.

He hates her so much, his anger pumps its way through veins underneath his tense skin as he grips her hips hard enough to break most glass. Rukia’s not glass. She’s skin and muscle and tense and her fingernails are digging into his thighs hard enough to scratch. In an ironic twist they’re in her bed, her house, under her pretense; Ichigo fucking Rukia into the damp sheets until she’s twisting every which way and biting into her palm.

God, “Oh  _ God _ \--” she’s everywhere, so tense around him and her reiatsu cools him like the cold winter moon does to the daytime, her skin is going to bruise under his touch like blotted ink and blood. “Rukia--”

_ I hate you, I hate you _ , in litany and in sync with his rolling hips Ichigo repeats the internal mantra he’s developed for the past ten years, it’s an instinct now. He has to hate her or else he couldn’t go on because he can’t love her. Not in this universe.

But he  _ can _ fuck her and he can touch her; she can bite him and writhe around him, so they take solace in that much, in each other. Ichigo doesn’t care how Rukia feels--it just means she at the very least is thinking about him, only him. He pulls her up by the waist, malleable in his forceful hands, until she’s only supporting herself by her shoulders. She tosses her head back; Ichigo remembers a time when her hair didn’t splay out so artfully behind her. Next time, he thinks, he’ll have her on her front so he can clutch at it until it hurts the both of them.

“Ichi--  _ oh _ !” Rukia’s voice pitches when Ichigo’s rhythm becomes brutal and punctuated. Now her fingernails scrape at the sheets and she’ll have a snag to explain to Renji later. But that’s later, this is now, and now Ichigo is reaching down to wrap a hand around her jaw.

“Don’t,” he warns, eyes sharp as his nails, “ _ don’t _ ,” he hates her voice. It’s so steady, it has been and would always be steady for him, even if his hands were wrapped around her throat. Pissed off, doomed to die angry, a disappointment to his father, he  _ hates _ Rukia, it’s all her fault; he doesn’t want to hear her protests.

(As if she would ever protest.)

Effectively restrained from talking Rukia instead bites out his name in frustrated syllables, arching her back to meet his thrusts. Entranced by the dance of the long lines of light on her skin, periodically cut out from the shadow of the blinds, Ichigo lowers his head to press his nose between her breasts, to taste the hollow dip at the end of her sternum where her arch meets its apex. His hands can’t stay still; they wander from their bruising grips to venture over the smooth slip of her arousal-damp skin, the stray hairs stuck to her back. If he could sink his fingers into her sides he would pull until she opened up and he could bury himself within her. Suffocating them both within each other--he can’t  _ breathe _ around her anymore.

Ichigo hates her, he has for ten years since she cried for the first time in front of him when they said goodbye at the Karakura bridge, and if she doesn’t stop looking at him right now with those same eyes he might just punch a hole in the wall.

“Ichigo--”

_ I hate you, I hate you so much. _

“Shut--”

_ Stop talking, I hate it when you talk. _

“You--”

_ I hate you. I-- _

“You’re  _ ruining _ it!” Ichigo cries out and braces his hand against the wall; luckily only his palm hits and he uses that as leverage to rock his length in and out in fast smooth slides until Rukia’s spasming around him, clutching a pillow to her face to muffle a single wavering cry as her orgasm pulls her muscles taut. During her comedown she becomes more and more aware of sweat running down her hands.

She uncovers her face and notices it’s tears, it’s Ichigo crying and still rolling his hips, helpless to the crush of sensations at the same time. “I’m-- trying to hate you-- but I can’t, Rukia, it’s too much,” his nose is running and he cums with a sob, his head knocking into the wall.

His post-orgasmic tremors evolve into shudders as he sniffles back a strangled cry balling in his throat. Rukia watches him with worried eyebrows but clear eyes and breaks down his resolve with a single, “Oh, Ichigo.”

“ _ Rukia _ ,” he sobs and it sounds like a cough, “I’m trying  _ so hard _ ,” sweat and a tear run down his nose as she gathers him up in her arms, slipping out of her along the way.

“I know,” she collects him like gathering up rubble. “I know.” Even now as Ichigo mourns over the loss of his decade long control she remains steady, her hands smooth and cool against his heated back.

“It would be easier if I--”

“It won’t ever be easy, Ichigo.” The noise he makes breaks her heart.

“I’ve tried for ten years, Rukia,” he grasps for words like picking up thumbtacks. A decade of hurt fills his lungs, strangling his words that were once so steady even as Aizen held him up by the neck in front of Karakura.

Only Rukia, standing nothing in height or size next to him, can fell him with a single look.

As he calms himself against her shoulder Rukia rests her cheek against the stubbly line of his jaw. “It would hurt less if you let yourself understand.”

“ _ No _ .” The saline slick of his tears glues his face to the side of her head. “I’m married now. I have to love-- my wife.” They don’t ever say their names.   
  
“Does that mean you have to lie to yourself about it too?”

“Yes, or else I--”

“Ichigo,” her voice takes on an edge rivaling her blade, “this is running from your problems.”

“I’m dealing with it as best as I can.”

“Please get off of me.”

“I don’t want you to go,” he pleads but his flash-quick grip is heavy steel around her. Ichigo is powerful but young and in love so Rukia  _ shoves _ him off with a foot.

“I am  _ not _ ,” Rukia breathes, still steady but quiet. Her back is to Ichigo, shoulders arched to her ears as she pulls the sheet across her, “some old sock that you can dump your frustrations into. If you love me then don’t lie.”

_ But I hate you _ . Inside, his hollow hisses and smacks him and grabs him by the hair and forces him to look,  _ look at her you cowardly shit of a king _ .

“Not even to yourself, because I  _ know _ you, Ichigo.”

_ I hate when she says that, I hate that so much _ .

The sheet whispers against the bed, falling to the floor, and her hair spills over her shoulders when she reaches to touch his damp cheek. His hollow calms; his mind blanks, like water against embers. He forgets what he was thinking, all faculties flooded with relief as she touches his face for the first time in ten years.

He’s seventeen again, he’s with her by the bridge, and in this timeline instead of tears she wipes away an eyelash on his flushed cheek as they walk home. She still doesn’t understand the concept of making wishes in the world of the living so when it flutters away she belts  _ I wish Ichigo would get me the new Chappy case! _ And he laughs freely because he loves her. In all universes he would, even in this unfair one where she kisses him with the only lips he wants to claim and he has to lie to himself about her.

He loves her, _ I love her, _ her eyes and her hair and her steady voice, a decade into the future. His recognition of that as he kisses her back for the first time in ten years sets his heartbeat in motion once more.

**Author's Note:**

> I typed this solely to make my friends yell at me. Self-beta'd, as per usual.  
> Hope you enjoy this, I actually don't usually write angst!


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